Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

East Asia And The Global Economy: Japan's Ascent, With Implications For China's Future, Stephen Bunker, Paul Ciccantell

Paul Ciccantell

After World War II, Japan reinvented itself as a shipbuilding powerhouse and began its rapid ascent in the global economy. Its expansion strategy integrated raw material procurement, the redesign of global transportation infrastructure, and domestic industrialization. In this authoritative and engaging study, Stephen G. Bunker and Paul S. Ciccantell identify the key factors in Japan’s economic growth and the effects this growth had on the reorganization of significant sectors of the global economy. Bunker and Ciccantell discuss what drove Japan’s economic expansion, how Japan globalized the work economy to support it, and why this spectacular growth came to a dramatic …

New Historical Materialism, Extractive Economies, And Socioeconomic And Environmental Change, Paul Ciccantell

Paul Ciccantell

In this chapter, I examine the dual character of the role of raw materials in the evolution of the capitalist world-economy. The following sections will outline the key elements of new historical materialism, a theoretical model that builds on the work of Wallerstein (1974, 1979), Chase-Dunn (1989), and Arrighi (1994, 2009) in order to understand the multiple roles of raw materials in shaping the past five centuries of the capitalist world-economy. New historical materialism highlights the need to examine economic ascent in the core, the exploitation of the periphery, the relationships between these processes, and the impacts of these relationships …

Rethinking Global Commodity Chains: Integrating Extraction, Transport, And Manufacturing, Paul Ciccantell, David Smith

Paul Ciccantell

The global commodity chains (GCCs) approach is an insightful way to understand issues of “development” and how processes of production and consumption vary across physical and social space. The key questions that this perspective prompts are inherently both sociological and geographic, integrating social and natural processes. How and where do these commodity chains “touch down”? How do they affect local people and places? Acknowledging the analytical usefulness of the GCCs framework, we propose rethinking it in three basic ways.

First, many of the studies associated with GCCs research tend to focus on only part of the commodity chain – and …

China’S Economic Ascent Via Stealing Japan’S Raw Materials Peripheries, Paul Ciccantell

Paul Ciccantell

China’s rapid economic ascent over the past three decades offers an important opportunity to study economic ascent and its potential to transform the world economy as it happens. This “real-time” opportunity avoids the analytic traps of post-hoc examinations of long term structural change that may neglect agency, understate the role of competition between states and firms, and imply that the outcome was historically inevitable. The current severe challenges to U.S. hegemony economically and politically provide an analytic window for studying hegemonic competition and long term change.

This paper analyzes China’s efforts to resolve the most fundamental obstacle to sustained rapid …

The General Social Survey (Gss): The Next Decade And Beyond, Patricia White, Paul Ciccantell

Paul Ciccantell

This volume reports the findings and recommendations of an NSF conference on the General Social Survey.

Nature, Raw Materials And Political Economy, Paul Ciccantell, David Smith, Gay Seidman

Paul Ciccantell

At the beginning of the 21st century, nations, economies and people around the world confront tremendous environmental challenges. Conflicts in oil-producing areas threaten production and increase prices at the same time that many argue that global oil supplies have begun a long term decline. Access to water drives growing numbers of social and military conflicts. International efforts to address global warming falter as major polluting nations withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol. Deforestation in the rainforests of Southeast Asia, Africa and the Amazon threaten to change global weather patterns and increase poverty in many of the world=s poorest nations. Even the …

Globalization And The Race For Resources, Stephen Bunker, Paul Ciccantell

Paul Ciccantell

Globalization is a self-reinforcing, ever-expanding cycle of interdependent economies of scale in production and transport attempting to resolve the diseconomies of space they create. In Globalization and the Race for Resources, Stephen G. Bunker and Paul Ciccantell integrate ecological and economic explanations of extraction and production into a comparative history of six hundred years of globalization that explores the sequence of trade dominant nations—Portugal, Holland, Britain, the United States, and Japan—and shows how each devised technologies, social and financial institutions, and markets that enhanced their particular locational advantages within this cycle.

Globalization of the world economy results from the progressive …

Matter, Space And Technology In Past And Future Hegemonies, Stephen Bunker, Paul Ciccantell

Paul Ciccantell

This paper uses new historical materialism as a theoretical framework to examine long term change in the world economy.

Restructuring Markets And Reorganizing Nature: The Political Economy And Ecology Of Japan’S Global Search For Raw Materials, Paul Ciccantell, Stephen Bunker

Paul Ciccantell

How did Japan rise to challenge U.S. economic supremacy? We argue that the foundation of Japan's rise from a defeated nation in 1945 to an economic powerhouse is the raw materials that Japanese firms have turned into cars, ships, consumer electronics, and of other industrial products. A small island nation that lacked adequate domestic supplies of virtually all the raw materials essential to industrial production became a world leader in the production of steel and of products which required millions of tons per year of raw materials. Japanese firms and the Japanese state turned an apparent material and economic disadvantage, …

Nature, Raw Materials, And Political Economy: An Introduction, Paul Ciccantell, David Smith

Paul Ciccantell

In this introductory chapter, we briefly outline the history of the political economy of raw materials, focusing particularly on the relationship between raw materials and economic development. We then introduce the chapters of this volume, and we conclude by discussing future directions for research in this area.

Transporting Raw Materials And Shaping The World-System: Creating Hegemony Via Raw Materials Access Strategies In Holland And Japan, Stephen Bunker, Paul Ciccantell

Paul Ciccantell

In this paper, we examine the roles of raw materials and their transport as key generative sectors in the ascent of two rising core economies, Holland and Japan. We show that the organizational, technical, and informational capacities developed by these states and by the Dutch and Japanese shipbuilding, shipping, and raw materials firms to assure access to and to transport raw materials led to the creation of those capacities across many sectors of their national economies, driving the broader processes of national development and the rise of these nations to preeminent positions in the capitalist world-economy. By comparing two cases …

Generative Sectors And The New Historical Materialism: Economic Ascent And The Cumulatively Sequential Restructuring Of The World Economy, Stephen Bunker, Paul Ciccantell

Paul Ciccantell

The causes and consequences of inequality between national economies, the as- cent to dominance within the world hierarchy of economies, and the dynamics driving the material intensification and spatial expansion of production and trade in the world economy have long been core questions in a wide range of fields concerned with economic change and development and with international rela- tions. In this article, we propose that one of the fundamental mechanisms driving all three of these processes for at least the last 500 years has been a dynamic ten- sion, or contradiction, between the economies of scale that reduce relative …

Building The Nafta Railway: The Kansas City Southern Railway In The North American Economy, Paul Ciccantell

Paul Ciccantell

This paper examines the strategies of the Kansas City Southern Railway to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Nafta And The Reconstruction Of U.S. Hegemony: The Raw Materials Foundations Of Economic Competitiveness, Paul Ciccantell

Paul Ciccantell

This paper argues that conflicting assessments of the impacts of free trade in North America are incomplete because they do not analyze these effects in light of the key long term U.S. goal: the reconstruction of U.S. hegemony that was under siege by Japan and Europe. The declining competitiveness of U.S. raw materials supply systems badly damaged U.S. hegemony during the 1970s and 1980s. The original U.S. strategy was to create a continental energy market to reduce overseas oil imports, guarantee access to oil and natural gas from Canada and Mexico, and reduce price instability. The evolution into broader agreements …

Globalization And Raw Materials-Based Development: The Case Of The Aluminum Industry, Paul Ciccantell

Paul Ciccantell

Current popular and scholarly analyses of the process of globalization often assume that this is a new phenomenon and that it operates in the same manner across all sectors of the economy. This paper argues that precisely the opposite is true: globalization is a longstanding process that exhibits distinct characteristics in different industries and different time periods. The analytic strategy to examine this process is historically grounded in the aluminum industry, one of the pioneers of the process of globalization. This paper analyzes the changing nature of the process of globalization in the aluminum industry, focusing attention on the articulation …

Making Aluminum In The Rainforest: The Social Impact Of Globalization In The Brazilian Amazon, Paul Ciccantell

Paul Ciccantell

A great deal of recent attention in the social science literature has focused on the process of globalization, the increasing economic and social integration of all regions of the world. The development of the capitalist world economy over the last five hundred years has been tied to and dependent upon the incorporation of socially and geographically remote regions and ecosystems into the world economy.1 A major driving force behind this process of incorporation has been increasing demand for raw materials to fuel industrialization and feed growing populations in the core nations.2 This process of raw materials-based incorporation is shaped by …

Economic Ascent And The Global Environment: World-Systems Theory And The New Historical Materialism, Paul Ciccantell, Stephen Bunker

Paul Ciccantell

The manipulation and reorganization of the relationship between nature and society is the most complex task confronting any ascendant economy. Gaining secure, inexpensive access to the huge volume of raw materials building blocks of capitalist industrial production requires economic, political, technical, and organizational innovations that restructure both existing social relationships (e.g. core-periphery relations) and the characteristics of the nature-society nexus (e.g. what raw materials are extracted where and by whom). The strategies of states and firms in ascendant economies to accomplish this task create what we term "generative sectors": leading economic sectors that are simultaneously key centers of capital accumulation, …

It's All About Power: The Political Economy And Ecology Of Redefining The Brazilian Amazon, Paul Ciccantell

Paul Ciccantell

What happens to rural communities in remote raw materials-rich regions when their definitions of the region's natural resources are confronted with competing and incompatible definitions presented and enforced by external actors? The social constructionist approach in environmental sociology provides an essential counterbalance to environmental determinism, but this article argues that in many contexts social construction is actually a process of the imposition of external actors' material interests over the objections of local groups. New historical materialism, via an interdisciplinary and multimethod research strategy, analyzes the changing definitions and uses of the Brazilian Amazon as a revelatory case study of the …

Introduction: Space, Transport, And World-Systems Theory, Paul Ciccantell, Stephen Bunker

Paul Ciccantell

No abstract provided.

Space And Transport In The World-System, Paul Ciccantell, Stephen Bunker

Paul Ciccantell

No abstract provided.

Afterword: Space, Transport, And The Future Of The Capitalist World Economy, Paul Ciccantell, Stephen Bunker

Paul Ciccantell

No abstract provided.

Restructuring Space, Time And Competitive Advantage In The World-System: Japan And Raw Materials Transport After World War Ii, Stephen Bunker, Paul Ciccantell

Paul Ciccantell

No abstract provided.

The Evolution Of The World Aluminum Industry, Stephen Bunker, Paul Ciccantell

Paul Ciccantell

No abstract provided.